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Friday, June 16, 2017

A Talk Meant For Another Day in Saner Times - and Hopefully With Sensible People . . .

Some times you really don't give a shit to talk about a subject if only because doing so would just be that much more gratuitous misery in your life. The words outright refuse to flow from the brain to the fingertips on the keyboard.

The Gadfly has an opinion or three on the shooting this past week that involved a GOP congressman and several others in Alexandria VA.

It goes without saying that it was a horrendous act of senseless violence, perpetrated by a person who is quite clearly not right in their head. It equally goes without saying that The Gadfly does not wish such violence upon anyone, and most certainly not on someone with opposing political ideologies.

And as far as any crass, albeit fitting, "chickens come home to roost" observations -- well, let's just let that sleeping dog lie where it lays for the time being -- mkay?

There is so very much deeper meaning to be read in to this incident - but alas, since most American's don't read much anymore, it is precisely the reason why The Gadfly does not feel at all motivated to participate in any debate over it ---- at this time.

No -- The Gadfly is not going to talk about this subject right now, because he would immensely prefer to allow the inimitable Charles Pierce of Esquire Politics to deliver a much more couth and articulate gut punch of a dissertation. Observe an excerpt:

Political violence has been a way of life in this country for most of its existence, reaching a kind of peak in the years between 1850 and 1865, but continuing in many forms for most of the next century. (Just recently, New Orleans took down a monument to an act of outright seditious political violence.) Lynchings were acts of political violence. In the 1920s, anti-lynching bills couldn't even get out of committee in the Congress because the political power in the South needed lynchings to sustain itself. The destruction of thriving African-American communities in Greenwood in Tulsa and in Rosewood in Florida were both acts of political violence.

I don't know what Native Americans in my age bracket (or older) think about when they hear white politicians express amazement that political violence exists in this country. Political violence of one kind or another has been directed at them since the first white people stepped off the first boat. It has been the one constant in their lives for as long as there has been a United States of America. And this has been merely a precis of acts of actual political violence. The political violence of the mind—which these acts were aimed to induce—is even more widespread and just as damaging.